I'm used to giving lectures on dance criticism or talking about my job to interested adults. But when I was asked to participate in a project involving primary school children from Years 4 and 6 I was in unknown terrain. When I was eight years old I didn't even know what a dance critic was. How was I meant to sustain these children's interest through two 90-minute sessions?

But the team behind Seeing, Doing, Knowing – a programme attached to the Norfolk & Norwich festival, which has recently finished – knew exactly what they were doing. They had picked a perfect show from the festival: a fusion of dance, acrobatics and physical theatre called Chouf Ouchouf which, as it happened, I had reviewed earlier in London. They had also spent careful time in the classroom guiding the children through how to think about what they were seeing, and how to write about it. By the time I came to Norwich the reviews had been written and my job was to talk about them, and about dance criticism with the children.

Kids take no prisoners. Long before we got on to the subjects of writing or dance, they wanted to know how old I was, how much I earned, what kind of car I drove, what I liked to drink – whether, indeed, any of my friends laughed at me for being a journalist! But they wanted to know serious things, too, like why I loved certain shows or certain dancers, and how I felt when I gave bad reviews. And when we focused on Chouf Ouchouf the discussion got still sparkier.

Some of the children's responses to the show had clearly been filtered through language absorbed from adults. Although that was no a bad thing, "surreal" and "minimalist" is classy vocabulary for eight-year-olds. Some of the writing, though, was wildly, charmingly and impressively original – such as one child's phrase for evoking the whirling speeds of the scene changes and the acrobatics ("the floor seemed to be spinning"), or another child's description of being wrung out with excitement as he "achingly staggered" his way back to the coach.

Beyond being an imaginative extension of the literacy curriculum, Seeing, Doing, Knowing justified its name in one other fundamental way. Going to the theatre was not a normal feature of many of these children's lives; some came from relatively deprived backgrounds. And the discipline of discussing this show, paying close attention to it and trying to capture it in words had clearly given them a genuine sense of ownership over what they had seen. It had given them the confidence to trust in their own curiosity, their own reactions. I don't know if I inspired any of them to want to become critics (though a few promised to enter this year's version of the Guardian young arts critic competition, launching later this month. But some of them definitely sounded as if they wanted to go back to the theatre for more.